03/09/2026
At every taxi rank in Johannesburg, as at ranks across the rest of the country, a fluent and entirely unofficial language exists: one finger raised for town, four for Fourways, a quick “sho’t right” that drops you, with surprising precision, at exactly the corner you meant. Miss the signs, and you’d assume there was nothing there to write down: the reasonable but mistaken belief that a system nobody authorised can’t really be a system at all.
Can you believe it took an artist, Susan Woolf, who talked to drivers, who watched, who painted what she saw, until 2009 to publish these obvious observations as South Africa’s first taxi hand-sign lexicon? Proof that the language had been there the whole time, waiting for someone patient enough to notice it.
This translation, of what we all know but have never found the words for, is what we do at The Culture Foundry. Watch long enough, and the unwritten rules write themselves.
